This will be a course about early science, Islam, and the Latin west; about the early history of Islam and the Arabs, about the early development of (non-Arabic) Islamic culture and science, and the medieval transmission of scientific knowledge from the Muslim world to the Latin west.
It is sometimes said that the western, Latin Middle Ages brought together the three ingredients that make up what we call ‘western civilisation’: the cultures or civilisations of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. But the truth is that there is a fourth ingredient at least as important as any of these three in the development of the civilisation of Europe and ‘the West’, and that is the fourth city: Mecca, and the Muslim civilisation of the early Middle Ages. (Well, really it should be Baghdad … but that isn’t quite as evocative. What I mean is Muslim civilisation.)
These lectures are designed to both offer a wider introduction to the origins and culture of the earlier Islamic world and in particular to understand the development of the sciences (natural philosophy, medicine, mathematics, cosmology, etc.) in the early Islamic world. After a survey of the Middle East before Mohammed and the early history of Islam, we will look at the early development of Islamic centres of learning, and how Muslim intellectuals and theologians had reason to adopt a panoply of ideas and technology from a wide range of the civilisations and cultures that were not part of the Muslim world. The Muslim absorption of Hebrew, Persian, Hindu, Christian, and Greek ideas will be discussed, and how these various intellectual and scientific ideas became part of Islamic thinking.
The Islamic development of science was nothing short of spectacular, and explosive: within a couple of centuries of the birth of Islam, Islamic science was probably the most sophisticated and most creative in the world. Some aspects of this development will be discussed, mostly with respect to how Islamic science used, developed, and differed from its Greek origins. Then, from the 11th century, came trade and scholarly contacts with the Christian Latin west, and by various routes (Salerno, Sicily, and Spain) came the great wave of translation and transmission of Arabic texts into the West. Usually characterised as a transmission of Greek scientific or natural philosophical texts, it was in fact a transmission of Arabic texts – some based on Greek authors, but many not.
It is the substance and influence of this transmission that will be discussed at the end of this course; not so much in terms of the medieval inheritance from ancient Greece as the inevitable and vast inheritance the medievals gained from Islam. Western medicine and western mathematics – for example – were completely transformed by what Latin scholars learned of ancient Greek sources from the Arabs, but medicine and mathematics were also (perhaps even more) influenced by the properly Arab-Muslim developments in these fields. But even more significant was the very basis of medieval natural philosophy and (eventually) theology in Aristotle… in a Latin medieval reading of a Muslim reading of Aristotle, and the Christian adoption of an essentially Qur’anic justification of doing (Christian) science.
Those who attend these lectures should bring along a good sense of humour, common sense, and tolerance. The lecturer believes that lectures should be lectures, and does not use PowerPoint.
